Friday, September 14, 2012

Today I'm getting ready for next weeks beginner's homebrewing class. This means doing a little advanced brewing. I want to give the students all of the information they will need to brew an easy extract batch of beer at home and an important part of that lesson is the bottling process. So, in order to have beer to bottle next week, today I'm brewing 11 gallons of a simple German hefeweizen.

In class we'll brew a dry malt extract hefeweizen recipe which consists of 4 lbs. of More Beer's Bavarian Wheat (DME 40C, 60% malted wheat and 40% malted barley) along with 1 lb. of cane sugar to help dry it out and a single addition of bittering hops for a 5 gallon batch. Then we'll bottle 5 gallons of the beer that I'm brewing today and each student will get to take home several bottles of the beer to condition at home and then after a couple weeks enjoy the fruits of their labors from class.

yeast starter

The recipe I'm brewing today is very straight forward and since one of my favorite styles of beer is the German hefe I brew it often with good results. The secret is pitching a large starter and fermenting in the low 60's.F. This time of year it's difficult for me to keep the temperature consistently low during the high krausen period of fermentation but with my wort chiller and post chiller set-up I'm able to begin with a pitching temperature of 60-62f. which gives me a good starting point while still allowing for a few degrees of temperature rise.